Romance languages, group of related languages all derived from Vulgar Latin within historical times and forming a subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family. The major languages of the family include French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, all national languages. Catalan also has taken on a political and cultural significance; among the Romance languages that now have less political or literary significance or both are the Occitan and Rhaetian dialects, Sardinian, and Dalmatian (extinct), among others. Of all the so-called families of languages, the Romance group is perhaps the simplest to identify and the easiest to account for historically. Not only do Romance languages share a good proportion of basic vocabulary—still recognizably the same in spite of some phonological changes—and a number of similar grammatical forms, but they can be traced back, with but few breaks in continuity, to the language of the Roman Empire. So close is the similarity of each of the Romance languages to Latin as currently known from a rich literature and continuous religious and scholarly tradition that no one doubts the relationship. For the nonspecialist, the testimony of history is even more convincing than the linguistic evidence: Roman occupation of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul, and the Balkans accounts for the “Roman” character of the major Romance languages. Later European colonial and commercial contacts with parts of the Americas, of Africa, and of Asia readily explain the French, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken in those regions.

Distribution of Romance languages in Europe.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

General considerations

Origins and distribution

The name Romance indeed suggests the ultimate connection of these languages with Rome: the English word is derived from an Old French form of Latin Romanicus, used in the Middle Ages to designate a vernacular type of Latin speech (as distinct from the more learned form used by clerics) as well as literature written in the vernacular. The fact that the Romance languages share features not found in contemporary Latin textbooks suggests, however, that the version of Latin they continue is not identical with that of Classical Latin as known from literature. Nonetheless, although it is sometimes claimed that the other Italic languages (the Indo-European language group to which Latin belonged, spoken in Italy) did contribute features to Romance, it is fairly certain that it is specifically Latin itself, perhaps in a popular form, that is the precursor of the Romance languages.

Although its influence has waned before the growing popularity of English as an international language, French is still widely used today as a second language in many parts of the world. The wealth of French literary tradition, its precisely formulated grammar bequeathed by 17th- and 18th-century grammarians, and the pride of the French in their language may ensure it a lasting importance among languages of the world. By virtue of the vast territories in which Spanish and Portuguese hold sway, those languages will continue to be of prime importance. Even though territorially it has comparatively little extension, the Italian language, associated with Italy’s great cultural heritage, is still popular with students.

Classification methods and problems

Though it is quite clear which languages can be classified as Romance, on the basis primarily of lexical (vocabulary) and morphological (structural) similarities, the subgrouping of the languages within the family is less straightforward. Most classifications are, overtly or covertly, historico-geographic—so that Spanish and Portuguese are Ibero-Romance, French and Franco-Provençal are Gallo-Romance, and so on. Shared features in each subgroup that are not seen in other such groups are assumed to be ultimately traceable to languages spoken before Romanization. The first subdivision of the Romance area is usually into West and East Romance, with a dividing line drawn across Italy between La Spezia and Rimini. On the basis of a few heterogeneous phonetic features, one theory maintains that separation into dialects began early, with the Eastern dialect areas (including central and south Italy) developing popular features and the school-influenced Western speech areas maintaining more literary standards. Beyond this, the substrata (indigenous languages eventually displaced by Latin) and superstrata (languages later superimposed on Latin by conquerors) are held to have occasioned further subdivisions. Within such a schema there remain problem cases. Is Catalan, for instance, Ibero-Romance or Gallo-Romance, given that its medieval literary language was close to Provençal? Do the Rhaetian dialects group together, even though the dialects found in Italy are closer to Italian and the Swiss ones closer to French? Sardinian is generally regarded as linguistically separate, its isolation from the rest of the Roman Empire by incorporation into the Vandal kingdom in the mid-5th century providing historical support for the thesis. The exact position of Dalmatian in any classification is open to dispute.

A family tree classification is commonly used for the Romance languages. If, however, historical treatment of one phonetic feature is taken as a classificatory criterion for construction of a tree, results differ. Classified according to the historical development of stressed vowels, French would be grouped with North Italian and Dalmatian but not with Occitan, while Central Italian would be isolated. Classifications that are not based on family trees usually involve ranking languages according to degree of differentiation rather than grouping them; thus, if the Romance languages are compared with Latin, it is seen that by most measures Sardinian and Italian are least differentiated and French most (though in vocabulary Romanian has changed most). By most nonhistorical measures, standard Italian is a “central” language (i.e., it is quite close and often readily intelligible to all other Romance languages), whereas French and Romanian are peripheral (they lack similarity to other Romance languages and require more effort for other Romance speakers to understand them).

Languages of the family

What constitutes a language, as distinct from a dialect, is a vexing question, and opinion varies on just how many Romance languages are spoken today. The political definition of a language—one that is accepted as standard by a nation or people—is the least ambiguous one; according to that definition, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are certainly languages and possibly also Romansh (since 1996 a semiofficial language of Switzerland, probably related to other Rhaetian dialects spoken in Italy) and Catalan (the official language of Andorra and the joint official language [together with Spanish] of the Spanish autonomouscommunities of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands). On linguistic grounds Sardinian (not the language of an independent nation since the 14th century) and Occitan (the medieval Provençal) are usually regarded as languages rather than dialects. The Rhaetian dialects of Italy (Ladin in the Dolomites and Friulian around Udine) are sometimes regarded as non-Italian, sometimes as dialects of the Italian language. Sicilian is different enough from northern and central Italian dialects to be given separate status often, but in Italy all neighbouring dialects are mutually intelligible, with differences becoming more marked with geographic distance. Franco-Provençal (the name given to a group of dialects spoken around the Alpine region of France and Italy) is often considered to be different from both French and Occitan, though some linguists hold that it is merely a transitional dialect. In the 21st century, few of the French know Franco-Provençal, though it still survives in Italy’s Valle d’Aosta region (where French, rather than Italian, remains the language of culture). Asturian and Galician (both spoken in Spain and Portugal), Corsican (France and Italy), and Piemontese, or Piedmontese (Italy), were once considered dialects of national languages, but by the 21st century they were considered distinct enough from the languages of their respective countries to be granted the status of languages. Other “dialects” also are fighting for “language” status on the basis of their written traditions or the active promotion of their use in writing.

Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino (not to be confused with Ladin), was once regarded not as an independent language but as an archaic form of Castilian Spanish preserving many features of the 15th-century language that was current when the Jews were expelled from Spain. There are some 100,000 to 200,000 speakers, mostly originating in the Balkans and Asia Minor but, after World War II, concentrated in Israel; most now reside in Israel, and others live in Turkey.

Some linguists believe that creoles are often different languages from their metropolitan counterparts. Haitian Creole, for instance, is said to be mutually unintelligible with French. Intelligibility varies so much with the speaker and the hearer, however, that it is difficult to formulate firm criteria on that basis.

Many Romance dialects literally or virtually ceased to be spoken in the 20th century. Of these, Dalmatian is the most striking, its last known speaker, one Tuone Udaina (Italian Antonio Udina), having been blown up by a land mine in 1898. He was the main source of knowledge for his parents’ dialect (that of the island of Veglia [modern Krk], though he was hardly an ideal informant. Vegliot Dalmatian was not his native language, and he had learned it only from listening to his parents’ private conversations. Moreover, he had not spoken the language for 20 years at the time he acted as an informant, and he was deaf and toothless as well. Most of the other evidence for Dalmatian derives from documents from Zara (modern Zadar) and Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) dating to the 13th–16th centuries. It is possible that, apart from isolated pockets, the language was then replaced by Croatian and, to a lesser extent, by Venetian (a dialect of Italian). It is certain, even from scanty evidence, that Dalmatian was a language in its own right, noticeably different from other Romance languages.

On the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia close to the island of Krk, another Romance variety precariously survives with probably fewer than one thousand speakers; known as Istriot, it may be related to Vegliot. Though some scholars connect it with Rhaetian Friulian dialects or with Venetian dialects of Italian, others maintain that it is an independent language. There are no texts except those collected by linguists. A little farther north in the same peninsula, another Romance dialect, Istro-Romanian (with about 300 mother tongue speakers in the second decade of the 21st century), is threatened with extinction. Usually classified as a Romanian dialect, it may have been carried to the Istrian Peninsula by Romanians from the northwestern part of the Balkan Peninsula who took refuge from the Turks in the 16th and 17th centuries; it has undergone strong Croatian influence. The first evidence of its existence is a short list of words in a historical work of 1698; there are also collections of folklore texts from the 19th century, but it is otherwise unwritten. Another isolated Romanian dialect that may be nearing extinction is Megleno-Romanian, spoken mainly in Kilkís prefecture, Greece, just west of the Vardar River, on the border between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece. In 1914 there were 13,000 speakers, but many emigrated to Asia Minor, other parts of what was once Yugoslavia, and Romania, where small pockets survive (they numbered about 5,000 speakers in the early 21st century). The only texts are those transcribed from oral traditions.

Other Romance tongues earlier ceased to be spoken. There is evidence, for instance, of an Ibero-Romance dialect spoken in Arab-occupied Spain until shortly after its reconquest by the Spanish, accomplished at the end of the 15th century. Usually known as Mozarabic, from the Arabic word meaning “Arabized person,” or as ʿajamī (“barbarian language”), it was originally the spoken language of the urban bourgeoisie, who remained Christian while the peasantry generally converted to Islam, but it appears that many Arabs also came to speak Mozarabic. Because most of the evidence, apart from a 15th-century glossary from Granada, is written in Arabic script (which uses no vowel signs), it is difficult to reconstruct the phonology of the language, but it appears to be a very conservative Ibero-Romance dialect. Much of modern information about Mozarabic comes from medical and botanical works that give Mozarabic terms alongside the Arabic. To this was added the discovery of Mozarabic refrains (kharjahs) attached to Arabic love ballads (muwashshaḥs) of the 11th and 12th centuries; study of these began only in 1948. For much of the Muslim period (beginning in 711), Christians were treated tolerantly and became culturally Arabized. Even after persecution by zealous Muslim newcomers in the 12th century, the Mozarabs were often in conflict with Westernized “liberators” from the north. Their language died out soon after the Arabs were driven out of Spain at the end of the 15th century, though it is sometimes claimed that Mozarabic has left its mark on the dialects of southern Spain and Portugal.

Other Romance varieties may have developed in peripheral regions of the Roman Empire only to die out under pressure from neighbouring non-Italic languages; these regions are called Romania submersa by specialists. Often these extinct Romance varieties are known from words borrowed into surviving languages; the Afro-AsiaticAmazigh (Berber) languages, for instance, bear witness to the long and brilliant Roman period in North Africa that ended in the 7th century ce with Arab invasions, and the Brythonic, or British Celtic, languages (especially Welsh) retain many traces of what appears to have been a conservative Romance dialect, otherwise eliminated by Anglo-Saxon in the 5th century. Albanian contains so many Romance words that some style it “semi-Romance,” and farther north, in what was formerly the Roman province of Pannonia (corresponding to modern western Hungary and parts of eastern Austria, Slovenia, and northern Serbia), Romance speech was probably not dead at the time of the Magyar invasion at the end of the 10th century. Thus, there is reason to believe that Romance dialects may have been spoken at one time over much of southeastern Europe. It is also evident that Romance languages have been retreating south before German for some time, and it is probable that Romance tongues were used in the whole of Switzerland and parts of Bavaria and Austria until roughly the 9th to 10th century.

Latin and the development of the Romance languages

Latin and the protolanguage

Latin is traditionally grouped with Faliscan among the Italic languages, of which the other main member is the Osco-Umbrian group. Oscan was the name given by the Romans to a group of dialects spoken by Samnite tribes to the south of Rome. It is well attested in inscriptions and texts for about five centuries before the Common Era and was used in official documents until approximately 90–89 bce. The absence of great dialectal variations in the texts suggests that they are written in a standardized form, though three alphabets are evident—the local one (derived from Etruscan), the Greek (in the southern cities), and the Latin (in more-recent inscriptions). In early times, Umbrian was spoken northeast of Rome, to the east of the Etruscan region, and possibly as far west as the Adriatic Sea at one period. It is attested mainly in one series of texts, the Iguvine Tables (Tabulae Iguvinae), dated from 400 to 90 bce, and it is similar to Oscan. Probably Latin and Osco-Umbrian were not mutually intelligible; some claim they are not closely related genetically but that their common features arose from convergence as a result of contact.

The Roman dialect was originally one of a number of Latinian dialects, of which the most important was Faliscan, the language of Falerii (modern Civita Castellana), the most-important Faliscan city, located 32 miles (51 kilometres) north of Rome. The Faliscans were probably a Sabine tribe that early fell under Etruscan domination. The dialect is known mainly from short inscriptions dating to the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce and probably survived until well after the conquest of Falerii by the Romans in 241 bce.

The earliest Latinian text is an inscription on a cloak pin (fibula) of the 6th century bce, from Palestrina (Praeneste). Other Latinian inscriptions show marked differences from Roman Latin, for which there is, however, little evidence before the end of the 3rd century bce. What is certain is that the language changed so rapidly between the 5th century (the date of a mutilated inscription, probably a religious prescription, found in the Roman Forum and of the Twelve Tables, the contents of which are known from later evidence) and the 3rd century bce that older texts were no longer intelligible.

During that period the Romans subjugated their Latin neighbours (by 335 bce), and their language began to establish itself as a standard form, absorbing features from other dialects. The first author of any note was the comic dramatist Plautus (c. 254–184 bce), whose language is thought to reflect a spoken idiom, some features of which appear to have survived into Romance.

By 265 Rome had conquered Magna Graecia, in the south of the Italian Peninsula, and had begun to absorb Greek literary and cultural ideals. Poetic language was especially influenced by Greek until Latin poetry reached its zenith with Virgil. In the 1st century bce a literary prose developed; it emphasized elegance and clarity and rejected vulgarity and rusticity. Grammatical rules were codified and tightened and vocabulary pruned, and the cult of the harmonious balanced period held sway in rhetorical circles. With Cicero the prose style of the Golden Age attained its highest point; for the linguist, the distinction Cicero makes between the style of his letters and that of his speeches is especially interesting in that it provides evidence that even educated speech differed from written language. When Cicero uses the sermo plebeius (“plebeian speech”), his language is more elliptical, with shorter, less-complex sentences and more-colourful vocabulary (including plentiful diminutives). It seems obvious that truly popular language differed even more from the elaborate sophisticated classical literary idiom. There is evidence that archaic features, banned from literary style, survived in common speech right through to the Romance stage of the language. It is sometimes claimed that the language of the Roman historian and politician Sallust (c. 86–35/34 bce) approximated popular usage, but it is more probable that his archaizing style derives more from conscious imitation of old Roman poetry. The Roman “judge of elegance” Petronius Arbiter (died 66 ce) is thought to be imitating vulgar speech in the language of the character Trimalchio in the Cena Trimalchionis (“Banquet of Trimalchio”) section (chapters 26–78) of his Satyricon.

Notable characteristics of Classical Latin

The postclassical period

The emergence of Romance

In the European lands in which Romance languages are still spoken, it is of course certain that, at some point, Latin in some form was the normal language of most strata. Whether, however, the Romance languages continue rough peasant dialects of Latin or the usage of more cultured urban communities is open to question. There are those who maintain that the Latin used in each area differentiated as soon as local populations adopted the conqueror’s language for any purpose. According to this belief, dialects of Latin result from divergent developments, either through innovations in restricted areas or through the geographically restricted preservation of some features. It is obvious that Latin usage must have differed over a wide area, but the differences may have been merely phonetic and lexical variations—regional accents and usage—not affecting mutual intelligibility; on the other hand, they may have been profound enough to form the basis of further differentiation when administrative unity was lost. The latter hypothesis would suggest a long period of bilingualism (up to perhaps 500 years), as linguistic interference between languages in contact rarely outlives the bilingual stage. Virtually nothing is known about the status of the indigenous languages during the imperial period, and only vague contemporary references can be found to linguistic differences within the empire. It seems odd that not one of the numerous Latin grammarians should have referred to well-known linguistic facts, but the absence of evidence does not justify the assertion that there was no real diversification during the imperial era. Historical parallels are lacking—although the British Empire, for example, did export English to widely different lands, it lasted a comparatively short time, and its linguistic contribution was backed by modern communications media, besides being to some extent negated by nationalist feeling.

What is certain is that, even if popular usage within the Roman Empire showed great diversification, it was overlaid by a standard written language that preserved a good degree of uniformity until well after the administrative collapse of the empire. As far as the speakers were concerned, they apparently thought they were using Latin, though they were often conscious that their language was, through sheer ignorance, not quite as it should be. Not until about the 8th or 9th century—later in some parts—did it strike them that Classical Latin was perceptibly a different language, rather than merely a more polished, cultured version of their own.

The language of religion and culture

With the spread of Christianity, Latin penetrated to new lands, and it was perhaps the cultivation of Latin in a “pure” form in Ireland, whence it was exported to England, that paved the way for an 8th-century reform of the language by Charlemagne. Conscious that current Latin usage was falling short of Classical Latin standards, Charlemagne invited Alcuin of York, a scholar and grammarian, to his court at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen); there Alcuin remained from 782 to 796, inspiring and guiding an intellectual renaissance. It was perhaps as a result of the revival of so-called purer Latin that vernacular texts began to appear, for it now became obvious that the vernacular and Latin were not the same language. Thus, in 813, just before Charlemagne’s death, the Council of Tours decreed that sermons should be delivered in rusticam Romanam linguam (“in the rustic Roman language”) to make them intelligible to the congregation.

Latin has remained the official language of the Roman Catholic Church and as such has been in constant use by most Romance speakers; it was only within the last half of the 20th century that church services began to be conducted in the vernacular. As the language of science and scholarship, Latin held sway until the 16th century, when, under the influence of the Reformation, nascentnationalism, and the invention of the printing press, it began to be replaced by modern languages. Nevertheless, in the West, along with the knowledge of Greek, the knowledge of Latin has remained a mark of the educated person throughout the centuries, although in the mid-20th century the teaching of classical languages in schools declined significantly.

Latin in non-Romance languages

The prestige of Rome was such that Latin borrowings are to be found in virtually all European languages, as well as in the Berber languages of North Africa, which preserve a number of words, mainly agricultural terms, lost elsewhere. Basque has borrowed a good number of words, mainly from administrative, commercial, and military spheres, but it is difficult in some cases to determine whether the terms were later borrowings from Spanish, rather than from Latin. This uncertainty is not present in the case of the 800 Latin words found in three Celtic languages (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton)—words drawn from a wide sphere of activities. In the Germanic languages, borrowed Latin words principally involve trade and often reflect archaic forms. The very large number of Latin words in Albanian form part of the basic vocabulary of the language (including kinship terms) and cover such spheres as religion, although some of them may have been later borrowings from Romanian. In some cases the Latin words found in Albanian have survived in no other part of the former Roman Empire. Greek and Slavic languages have comparatively few Latin words, many of them administrative or commercial in character.

The development of the Romance languages

The question of when Latin ended and Romance began, which has occupied scholars in the past, is largely a problem created by terminology. In some senses, modern Romance languages are regional varieties of one uniform set of speech patterns that resembles the Vulgar Latin of attested texts fairly closely—indeed, the analyses of generative phonologists make the modern “underlying forms” (as distinct from their phonetic representation in speech) look almost identical with the reconstructed ancestor of the Romance languages, Proto-Romance. On the other hand, contemporary speakers are conscious that they are speaking a “different language” from their neighbours, even though they may understand a good deal of their neighbours’ discourse. Perhaps the speaker’s consciousness is the best measure of divergence; when, one may ask, did Romance speakers realize that they were not using Latin in their everyday speech? Some scholars suggest that the realization must have struck sometime in the 5th century, when barbarians were streaming into the Roman Empire and, supposedly, hindering communication. Others prefer to rely on positive textual evidence, indicative of efforts to make up a written form of Romance distinct from Latin. Such evidence begins to appear only in the 9th century, first in northern France and then in Spain and Italy. The reforms of Charlemagne, reestablishing more classical standards in written Latin, may have been at once cause and result of the development of conventional written forms for vernacular Romance. Perhaps it was also the emergence of a new type of social organization, feudalism, that had linguistic effects as a result of the splitting of the open society of Roman tradition into small closed territorial units.

Romance glosses to Latin texts

From the 7th century onward, consciousness of linguistic change was strong enough to prompt scribes to gloss little-known words in earlier Latin texts with more familiar terms. Though the glosses often reflect Romance forms, however, they are usually given in a Latinate form, and one gains the impression of a few superficial adjustments to archaic but fundamentally comprehensible texts. The best-known set of glosses—to the Vulgate Bible of St. Jerome—formerly belonged to the abbey of Reichenau, on an island in Lake Constance, Germany, and probably dates from the 8th century. The vocabulary of the Reichenau glosses appears to be French in flavour (e.g., arenam ‘sand’ glossed by sabulo, French sable; vespertiliones ‘bats,’ by calvas sorices, French chauvesouris), and some words of Frankish origin appear (e.g., scabrones ‘beetles’ is glossed by wapces ‘wasps,’ respectant ‘they look about’ by rewardant). Some of the glosses evince more widely spread innovations: emit ‘has bought’ is glossed by comparauit (Romanian cumpăra, Spanish comprar), fissura ‘crack’ by crepatura (Romanian crăpătură, Old French creveure). The glosses provide some evidence of morphological simplification (e.g., saniore ‘healthier’ is glossed by plus sano ‘more healthy’ and cecinit ‘he sang’ by cantavit), but for the most part only lexical items merit comment. Another well-known glossary, known as the Kassel (or Cassel) glosses, probably dates from the very early 9th century. It gives Latin equivalents of German (Bavarian) words and phrases and provides evidence of lexical and phonetic differentiation within Latin that permits scholars to localize the work as probably French or Rhaetian (e.g., mantun ‘chin,’ as compared with modern French menton). Although orthographically eccentric, however, the text is obviously meant to represent Latin, not a Romance tongue; when phrases rather than isolated words are glossed, the Latin is often very close to classical models.

The beginning of Romance literature

Later in the 9th century (with the Strasbourg Oaths, possibly, and more clearly in the Eulalia poem), deliberate attempts were made to write vernacular Romance, though the resources of the Latin alphabet were not wholly adequate to the task. That northern French texts were the first to appear is not surprising, for in that region Latin had changed more radically than elsewhere. By the 10th century the need to couch legal documents in more readily comprehensible vernacular, rather than Latin, was felt in other regions. Vernacular literature did not really get under way, however, until approximately the 12th century, when the arts flourished throughout western Europe. Rhaeto-Romance and Romanian, however, had to wait for the Reformation period to take on literary form.

There was a good deal of cross-fertilization between Romance literary languages during the period of development of medieval poetry; the example of the Provençal lyric especially left its mark on all vernacular literatures, and borrowing of lexical items from one language to another was abundant. The 13th century saw some shift of linguistic influence from southern to northern France and from Sicily to Tuscany, toward the politically and economically more powerful regions. Portuguese and Catalan developed flourishing literatures somewhat later, taking over some of the traditions of the badly battered southern French region and dominating the literary scene of the Iberian Peninsula. French was fast losing its hold in England, which, a century earlier, had boasted a rich Anglo-Norman literature, and within France the central Parisian dialect began to dominate. In Italy, the Florentine dialect was showing signs of rising to prominence and providing the base for a literary standard.

The rediscovery of classical literature and art, first in Italy and then in other Romance regions, had some considerable effect on the languages in the shape of extensive borrowing from Latin and Greek and, often, conscious attempts to model grammatical constructions in the vernacular on Classical Latin. The Italian standard language, in particular, owes much to the influence of Latin, which it resembles more closely than do the spoken dialects. French, except in the 16th century, was influenced grammatically less by Latin, but from the 14th century onward the habit of preferring words with a quasi-Latin shape to inherited forms became well established, so that much of the French vocabulary has a “learned” appearance. The trickle of Latinisms into Spanish became a flood in the 15th century, and, though Spanish has been more reluctant than French to reject old words, these Latinisms form a considerable proportion of the modern lexicon.

The standardization of the Romance languages

It was in Italy that the “question of the language” first became a matter of hot dispute. Dante himself made an important contribution to the debate on what should constitute a volgare illustre (an “illustrious popular speech”) capable of rivaling Latin for literary and scholarly purposes. Controversy did not reach its peak, however, until the 16th century. In the Spain of 1492 the completion of the reconquest of Spain from the Arabs and the so-called discovery of America were accompanied by the appearance of Antonio de Nebrija’s Gramática Castellana (“Grammar of the Castilian Language”), which argues the need for an ennobled language fit for imperial exportation. In 16th-century France, with the Renaissance backed by the Reformation and the advent of printing, French really assumed the remaining scholarly, scientific, and religious functions of Latin, and efforts were made to put together a worthy national language from dialect and Latin sources. The choice of standard was not made definitively, however, until the late 17th century, when, with political power and social influence centred exclusively at the royal court, the only acceptable usage became that of the court. It would seem that social acceptance and advancement were inextricably bound up with correct behaviour, especially linguistic behaviour, so that the well-to-do bourgeoisie set out to ape the speech habits of their “betters”—hence the popularity of works describing le bon usage ‘good usage.’ The influence of French, resplendent with the achievements of the French dramatic poet Racine and of Louis XIV, was destined to remain dominant within the Romance languages; the Golden Age of Spain and Portugal had already passed, and Italy was going through a period of comparative stagnation.

The French grammarians of the 18th century had lasting effect on all the Romance standards, concerned as they were with maintaining “purity,” eliminating “vulgarity,” and strictly codifying usage, often more in accord with logical than linguistic considerations. The belief that correct language is not a birthright but a tool to be carefully fashioned and skillfully handled, that conscious effort was required to allow it to mirror thought with the minimum of distortion, is one that has persisted in Romance and that still has important effects on educational practice. To many English speakers it seems ludicrous that the criterion of competence in a language should be strict adherence to grammar-book rules rather than nativelike performance, but in Romance countries a foreigner is often frowned upon if he permits himself the “negligence” of native usage, rather than the more stilted correct expression.

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French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish are called Romance languages. They-and a number of lesser-known languages and dialects-are all derived from medieval Latin dialects spoken in areas of Europe governed by the Roman Empire.

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